Mrs Beouf started walking back to her classroom. We were neighbors, our classrooms back to back and connected by two doors and the narrowest of walkways. “Coffee’s on in my room,” she said. “Left a step for you to get it. Already poured you a cup just the way you like it!”
Melony Beouf was forty-eight years old and had the kind of blonde hair that anyone past twelve could only have by going to a hairdresser. We’d been classroom neighbors for almost ten years. She was a friend, a mentor, and easily my greatest ally at work. She also towered over me and could potentially force me back into perpetual toddlerhood on the slightest whim. Like most of the faculty and staff, she was an Amazon. I was the only Little that was employed instead of enrolled.
Life is complicated…
I walked over to her room, taking nine or ten steps to stride across a divide that was very likely only three or four for her. I grabbed the cup of coffee that was waiting for me on the counter and joined her at one of her kidney tables. She sat in the teacher’s spot. I grabbed a student seat. It fit me anyway.
We sat there in silence for a moment. I drank my coffee slowly and fully; draining it with both hands before putting the mug down. To call something so loaded up with cream, sugar, and mocha flavoring “coffee” was likely a misnomer. Mrs Beouf took hers black and took it in little sips.
Both of us, still tired. Both of us, desperately needing the coffee to get through the day.
I never considered myself a Helper- what we in the Little community call those self-loathing, self-serving souls that do everything they can to please Amazons on the off chance that they won’t end up back in diapers because they’ve been Good Little Helpers. In hindsight, because of rituals like this and other contexts that I’ll soon reveal, I can see why I might be accused of such, so I can’t begrudge my accusers.
I looked around Beouf’s room, and if not for a few small details of decoration or building geography, I might think I was in my own. Our classrooms were nearly identical in form but completely different in function: we each had toy chests, kidney tables, art supplies, low level academic posters for decorations, televisions and DVD libraries stacked with cartoons year-round and cabinets filled with healthy snacks. We shared equipment for various pretend and play centers that we rotated in and out of our respective rooms throughout the school year. Both of us had in class bathrooms with toilets too tiny for an Amazon adult to sit on comfortably. Nearly identical.
But to the side of her classroom was an extra room filled with old but sturdy cribs. Her bathroom also had a heavy oak changing table in addition to the toilet. The table saw infinitely more use than the toilet.
I was Oakshire Elementary’s pre-kindergarten teacher. She taught Oakshire Elementary’s “Maturosis and Developmental Plateau Unit,” a phrase which here means “a classroom that regresses Littles so that they have shit in their brains as well as their pants.”
I had a class of mostly Amazon three- and four-year-olds. My job was to get them potty trained and have them ready for kindergarten by the time they hit age five.
Mrs Beouf’s class was comprised exclusively of “adopted” Littles, and her job was to do the exact opposite: to make them not only dependent on diapers and the Amazonian “Mommies and Daddies” who changed them, but to ensure that they accepted their new status. Make them like it.
And we were friends.
Life is very complicated…